"My Own Portrait in Writing"

Self-Fashioning in the Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Author/Illustrator/Editor: Patrick Grant

A theoretically informed interpretation of Van Gogh’s literary achievement that is without precedent.

Many have drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence for insights into his art and personal struggles. In this volume, however, Patrick Grant sets out to explore the criteria by which we might judge Van Gogh’s letters to be literary. Drawing especially on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of self-awareness as an ongoing dialogue between “self” and “other,” Grant examines the ways in which Van Gogh’s letters raise, from within themselves, questions and issues to which they also respond. In his keenly perceptive reading, Grant deconstructs the binaries that surface in both Van Gogh’s writing and painting, discusses the narrative dimensions of the letter-sketches and their recurring themes of fantasy, belief and self-surrender.